Report Recommends Exercising 4-5 Days a Week to Slow Down Your Heart's Aging

A study published in the Journal of Physiology found exercising for four to five days a week can help keep the heart young, which could represent an important step in developing regimens to slow aging, reports EurekAlert . A cross-sectional analysis of 102 people older than 60 featured a consistently logged lifelong exercise history. Measures of arterial stiffness were collected from all subjects, who were categorized as either sedentary, casual exercisers, committed exercisers, or master athletes. A lifelong history of casual exercise, about two to three times a week, led to more youthful middle-sized arteries, while those who exercised four to five times a week also had more youthful large central arteries. Larger arteries appear to require more frequent exercise to stay youthful, a finding that will aid the development of long-term exercise regimes. They also enable the researchers to now concentrate on whether or not aging of the heart can be reversed by exercise training over a long period of time. "Previous work by our group has shown that waiting until 70 is too late to reverse a heart's aging, as it is difficult to change cardiovascular structure even with a year of training," says study co-author Benjamin Levine. "Our current work is focusing on two years of training in middle-aged men and women, with and without risk factors for heart diseases, to see if we can reverse the aging of a heart and blood vessels by using the right amount of exercise at the right time."